The Company History 1890-2015
E-Book, Englisch, 432 Seiten
ISBN: 978-3-406-67822-6
Verlag: C.H.Beck
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Even before the First World War, Allianz had entered the international insurance industry. But the two World Warsde stroy edits early attempts at global expansion. Not until the 1980s was Allianz able to reach the same degree of internationalization it had already achieved before 1914, breaking through to become a global insurer. Since the 1920s, Allianz had already enjoyed a leading position in Germany; the company was able to build on this after 1945. Barbara Eggenkämper, Gerd Modert, and Stefan Pretzlik describe the development of its numerous business sectors as well as the various strategies of the different director sand their boards, illuminating Allianz’s working worlds and the way they changed as the use of technology increased. What emergesis a multilayered narrative of the 125-year history of Allianz that gives voice not only to the leadership but also to the many employees.
Autoren/Hrsg.
Fachgebiete
- Wirtschaftswissenschaften Finanzsektor & Finanzdienstleistungen Versicherungswirtschaft
- Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Deutsche Geschichte
- Wirtschaftswissenschaften Wirtschaftswissenschaften Unternehmensgeschichte, Einzelne Branchen und Unternehmer
Weitere Infos & Material
1918–1933
CRISES, RATIONALIZATION,
AND GROWTH
On November 11, 1918, at eleven in the morning, the guns fell silent. The day before, the German Kaiser Wilhelm II had decamped to the Netherlands. An age was ending, but people’s perceptions of this varied widely. The English economist John Maynard Keynes – attached to the British delegation at the Versailles peace conference – in 1919 described in his polemical essay, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, the opposing views of reality on the two sides of the English Channel: “In England the outward aspect of life does not yet teach us to feel or realize in the least that an age is over. […] In continental Europe, the earth heaves and no one but is aware of the rumblings. There it is not just a matter of extravagance or ‘labor troubles’; but of life and death, of starvation and existence, and of the fearful convulsions of a dying civilization.”[1] Keynes feared the worst for Europe’s future if the peace treaty were to be unbearably hard on the defeated powers. But in view of the catastrophic destruction of the First World War, and the hate that had built up, a negotiated peace could hardly be hoped for. Only a few months before, Germany had imposed the unbridled peace terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on Russia. And indeed, the German public felt the Treaty of Versailles, which put the legal seal on Germany’s defeat in June 1919, to be a “peace of humiliation,” which should be overcome as soon as possible.[2] Under the immediate impression of the revolutionary events, Ernst Grumbt, a member of the board of directors of Allianz, penned a newspaper article that was published on November 23, 1918, as a call for “unity and unanimity.” Vacillating between pathos, self-pity, and fear of the future, he invoked the will to struggle for a new beginning and democracy: “The die is cast. Germany’s fate is sealed; doomed to impotence, left helpless to the mercy of our enemies, we see before us a most dismal scene. As stormy as politics may be in the next few years, so lifeless and impoverished will economic life in our dear fatherland be […] Let us admit it openly and bluntly: despite all the denials of our incorrigible optimists, we are a ruined people, who will be barely permitted to survive if the terms of the peace are of the kind that the terms of the armistice suggest, with their outrageous severity, their harshness that makes a mockery of all humane feelings […] The plain fact is that they have no intention of granting Germany the position in the councils of nations which it formerly held, that they do not want it to become powerful and strong again. […] The domestic struggle is still raging, and all our thoughts and feelings must be devoted for the time being to this point, so that the despotism of a few does not become a permanent structure of government, those who believe that they should consider the free development of intelligence their most dangerous opponent. Only when we know that the domestic enemy has been stopped, and, if luck is with us, democracy triumphs for good, should we devote all our self to the service of combating external obstacles […] Let us not wait, crestfallen and downcast, for miracles that save the German people from the collapse of the realm – we might lose valuable time doing so. No – get to work, as soon as domestic conditions have consolidated. Commerce, industry, and transportation must […] march hand in hand towards the great goal: the reconstruction of our devastated fatherland.”[3] The period of the Weimar Republic, whose dramatic beginnings Ernst Grumbt commented on here shortly before leaving Allianz, became one of the most exciting, most dynamic, and most successful eras in the history of the company. But at first, uncertainty prevailed. Allianz faced enormous economic problems and political risks. The board of directors’ report to the stockholders on the situation of the company in the summer of 1919 was correspondingly bleak: “Due to the unfortunate course of the World War, the area in which we do business has been restricted, while operating costs are increasing continuously, the full weight of which will only be felt in the future. It is not possible at present to assess whether and to what extent it will be possible to compensate for this. The experiment of nationalizing the fire insurance business, currently under discussion again, would destroy tried-and-tested arrangements and threaten the livelihoods of many people; and links to other countries, which are so desirable, would be made more difficult, and German insurance companies would be deprived of the possibility of providing the desired insurance coverage for the property of German merchants abroad. The financial advantages hoped for are unlikely to be achieved to the extent expected, while they could be ensured in other ways, without destroying a flourishing business. It is to be hoped that people in authority will not close their eyes to this insight.”[4] One generation departs: title page of a special edition of the Allianz Zeitung upon the death of director-general Paul von der Nahmer, who died on April 15, 1921. In his address, Paul von der Nahmer, the director-general of Allianz, who was 61 by now, only touched on a few of the most urgent challenges to his company. For example, as a consequence of the territorial losses of the German Reich to Poland, Belgium, France, Czechoslovakia, and Denmark imposed by the peace treaty, Allianz lost almost 15 percent of its annual premium revenues. The future of its activities abroad, which had amounted to 20 percent of its volume of business on the eve of the war, was entirely uncertain, and access to its international assets – bank accounts, securities, real estate – had been blocked by the governments of the wartime enemies, and of some of the neutral countries, for the time being. In addition, a fundamental debate, which had already been conducted repeatedly in the 1880s and during the war, was revived. The topic was whether society and the treasury would be better served if the insurance system, and in particular fire insurance, were monopolized in the hands of the state, or left to free-market competition.[5] As if this were not enough, numerous other questions were already on the horizon, to which the management and staff of Allianz had to respond during the few and stormy years of democracy: it was apparent that there would be a new generation of top executives in the company. Under the paralyzing influence of the war, and because von der Nahmer showed little interest in internal business processes, a backlog of necessary reforms had built up, which increased administrative costs and slowed work processes.[6] Economic pressures, but also the spirit of the time, demanded more efficient working methods and more modern management structures. Furthermore, the leading men of Munich Re and Allianz in 1917 had already begun to put the business relationship between the two insurance companies, which was mainly based on informal agreements, arrangements for individual cases, and personal agreements, on a clear legal and sustainable footing. An initial binding agreement in principle had already been concluded before. Finally, Allianz had to cut its umbilical cord to its founders and emancipate itself as an increasingly independent enterprise. By 1917 at the latest, Allianz’s bookkeepers noted the increasing premium revenues with some concern, strengthened by the fact that they personally were only able to buy less and less with their nominally growing salaries.[7] It was apparent that the mark was losing value. In the first years of the Weimar Republic, this became the fundamental challenge for Allianz, the insurance business, and the banking sector, but also for the German economy as a whole, and, in the end, a question of survival for democratic society. The war, its consequences, and the welfare policy of the post-war period were financed to a considerable extent by printing money, so that inflation finally went completely out of control. It destroyed the people’s financial assets. In addition, the government administrations of the Weimar Republic only succeeded briefly in restricting the growth of unemployment, until after 1929, German society finally “descended into the abyss” of the Great Depression.[8] At first, the U.S. banking system was destabilized, and then, as a result, the German financial sector as well: the insurance company Nordstern got into trouble in 1931, and in that same year, the Danat Bank, one of Germany’s largest financial institutions, went bankrupt. At the end of a rescue operation without parallel, in 1932, the largest banks in Germany were state owned, some via majority, some via minority holdings.[9] In Germany, the collapse of the financial markets initiated an economic depression of hitherto unknown magnitude, which weakened the unstable political system still further, and steered society, which was already sharply divided economically and ideologically, into conditions approaching civil war. Thus, its enemies were finally able to destroy democracy. In view of all these events and developments, it is all the more astonishing that Allianz, which was integrated in the global, European, and national structures of the economy, society, and politics in a wide variety of ways, succeeded during this period in surviving, modernizing itself, growing, and increasing...
